Risk, Uncertainty, and the Precautionary Principle
By: Andrew LakoffIn “The Catastrophic Harm Precautionary Principle,” legal theorist Cass Sunstein asks how to make regulatory decisions under conditions of uncertainty, in which probabilistic calculation cannot guide rational decision. He is especially interested in environmental issues such as climate change, but also links his argument to other catastrophic threats including avian flu and terrorism. Basically, he wants to show how the precautionary principle can be operationalized within a technocratic context guided by cost-benefit analysis. In his scheme, the rational application of such a principle would militate toward regulatory intervention in the present against the uncertain threat of a worst-case climate change scenario in the future. The argument is interesting for our purposes because it challenges the Beckian hypothesis that uncertain but potentially catastrophic threats are not amenable to the tools of technocratic calculation.
March 21st, 2007 at 10:44 am
I think it would interesting to compare the variety of technical approaches to problems of the future: prevention, preparedness, precaution(ary principle), and perhaps even pre-emption. I believe there is an extensive literature on precaution (including Ewald, for example). Melinda Cooper’s paper, “Preempting Emergence: The Biological Turn in the War on Terror” argues that the doctrine of preemption is being applied in public health as well as military strategy. What I think is interesting is that preparedness is clearly distinct from these other approaches, and has been studied much less.
March 21st, 2007 at 11:16 am
And there is also of course insurance. Ewald’s take on Beck is that precaution takes over when probabilistic calculation can no longer adequately manage catastrophic threats. But for Ewald, precaution is a principle of non-action. In a sense, Sunstein’s piece takes the next step: ie. yes, but we can still technically operationalize precaution via a new wrinkle on cost-benefit analysis. The argument that I make in “Preparing for the Next Emergency” (also taking up Beck and Ewald) is that preparedness - and its associated techniques, such as imaginative enactment - is an alternative to precaution in the face of threats that are outside the scope of probabilistic calculation.
March 21st, 2007 at 1:20 pm
Probabilistic calculation is certainly an important topos in all this. Here is an additional issue: Precaution only works for certain types of events (or the way we have come to think them). I have, for instance, never seen a precautionary type of argument in relation to pandemic influenza. For pandemic influenza, precaution doesn’t work, because the event is not preventable. It’s effects, however, can be mediated. Hence all the discussion about containment.